That Feeling When You Miss the Early 2000s

To be a teenager during George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq was to spend a significant amount of time actively fantasizing about the president facing a war crimes tribunal at The Hague. It was a period marked by meaningless deaths and falsehoods (namely that Iraq had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction). And yet, in 2018, a wistful reminiscence of the W. Bush years has taken hold. Network television has revived queasily irrelevant shows like “Will & Grace.” An actress from “Sex and the City” is making a serious bid for governor of New York. And a man who hosted the second most popular reality television program of 2004 is now president. How did this happen?

Many of the memorable touchstones of the early Bush years might be defined as emo, which began as a musical style in the mid-80s born from the hardcore punk scene in Washington, D.C., and reached its commercial peak in the early 2000s, coming to redefine all aspects of (white) late capitalism through a lens of narcissism, privilege, misogyny and self-pity. On the teen soap opera “The O.C.,” which debuted in the summer of 2003, Seth Cohen made Hollywood safe for sad nerds as he debated which of two too-good-for-him girls he should date. A mopey Zach Braff fell in love with Natalie Portman and shed a single tear in “Garden State.” On the radio, the resident troubadour was Bright Eyes’s Conor Oberst, who sang of military combat and relationships with a similar gravity: “We made love on the living room floor / with the noise in the background from a televised war.”

Considering that we now live in a world where the threat of destruction is not quite as remote as it was in 2003, it’s little wonder that we’ve become nostalgic for such inconsequential unhappiness. The early 2000s sad-sack band Dashboard Confessional (sample song title: “The Sharp Hint of New Tears”) just released a new album. Braff is starring in a new sitcom. A musical version of the 2004 film “Mean Girls” recently opened on Broadway, while Greta Gerwig’s 2002-set “Lady Bird,” another piece of art about a moody adolescent, brilliantly recreated the characterless look of the early aughts, “the age of throwaway fashion,” as the film’s costume designer has called it.

On Inauguration Day in 2017, George W. Bush became the surrogate for many displeased Americans willing to push aside his former travesties, because he suddenly seemed so relatable, grumpily sitting in the cold rain. After all, this was the man who taught an entire generation that the truth can’t prevent a demagogue from getting his way, a lesson that is once again pertinent. Emo’s general argument was that the proper response to futility was not to fight against it or even to wallow in existential longing but instead to deploy an excessive, almost comical level of self-absorption. As evidenced by recent countrywide protests over guns and gender rights, the country may have awoken from its apathy, but America will always have reserves of solipsistic melancholy. — M.H. Miller